The Friday Poem: ‘Wet Horses’ by John Boyd
Photo: laura a. watt / Getty Images
A new poem by Wellington poet John Boyd.
Wet Horses
Four hours in the car
Counting wet horses in unloved fields
Your feet up on the dash
As if braced for birthing
Travelling through a weak mist
Content in a calmness only found
At the epicenter of a marriage
In a fast car
Riding the brakes
Down Mt Messenger
Coasting in neutral
Is the simplest purity
Behind us the child sleeps
The doctors are optimistic
There’s nothing new to note
Except the white cell count
And wet horses
In unloved fields
The Friday Poem is edited by Chris Tse. Submissions are now being accepted until 31 January 2023. Please send up to three poems in a Word or PDF document to chris@christse.co.nz.
John Boyd
John was born in Whanganui and now lives in the bush that skirts Mt Kaukau in Wellington. John has two daughters with Jennifer, and Labradors Twig and Wilbur fill out the house. He believes that 'most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people'. His poems are placed in familiar and deeply ordiinary settings, and he aims for a refreshingly sharp-elbowed rendering of life, love and longing, He has published two collections - The Flower Factory (2014) and Bone on Bone (2018).
